How to read Qubes OS' website
@edavies @micahflee @espectalll as a Qubes user I can tell you that there are definitely people in the community that would do that.
Qubes has a lot of benefits that are not directly security related and a lot of people would probably have a better time using it compared to something else (as long as they don't need GPU support).
@edavies @espectalll @micahflee wellllll... there's SSL...
this basically allows end-to-end encryption to the hosting server.
But you're right that this doesn't validify the contents.
@upshotknothole @edavies @micahflee I certainly was going to address that. Keep in mind you have to rely on COMODO's certificates and not be fooled by the TLS certificate being replaced in some form of MiTM. But it is a rare issue, just one to be aware of when needed.
Otherwise, I absolutely agree, but keep in mind marketing has a huge role here. I mean, they claim to do "a reasonably secure OS". It better be reasonably secure... for the target audience.
@upshotknothole @espectalll @micahflee Exactly, the hosting provider could fiddle with the documents easily.
Toots ought to be signed, too.
@edavies @upshotknothole @micahflee Can't wait for Mastodon to become a federated keychain
@edavies @espectalll @micahflee this assumes user generated content. That's impossible to properly manage from a server side
@upshotknothole @espectalll @micahflee Yes, of course the signing needs to be done on the user's machine. It needs to be part of the web protocols and browser functionality.
(Which brings us back to Qubes - the VM you toot from needs access to at least a low-grade signing key so probably ought to be separate from the one you do most of your browsing on.)
@edavies @espectalll @micahflee that's not hard. You can separate the subkey from the master. The master can invalidate the subkey but the subkey itself can't harm the master.
Haven't used it for various VMs tho.
@espectalll @espectalll Fun fact, most people search for documentation online, despite it has been installed in /usr/share/doc on their harddrive. Some will also depend on GitHub for everything, even reading patches, despite the tools are installed locally in their systems.
Sometimes centralization is a result of humanity. We need better automation for user-controllable technology to stop these entirely unnecessary SPOFs from being created via "user laziness".
@niconiconi Rather than the result of humanity, it's the result of working as we've been taught. Browsing documentation is a whole skill that has to be trained, and most people have already acquired that of searching. You either make it easier to browse locally with the same skills, or make people learn how to get why they want by looking at some files and finding which ones may have what they're looking for.
@espectalll i love the Qubes Team! Their security decisions are reasonable!
(please notice that this is a compliment. Most people who claim to provide secure computing don't even have a canary up. The security industry is infested with people who don't understand the very basic elements of this topic)
@espectalll @micahflee Hmm, yes, I suppose it's possible some Qubes users will actually do that.
But, more generally, it does show a rather gaping hole in standard web infrastructure in that there's no general mechanism to convey and check the original author's signature on web pages.